The first edition of ICT for sustainable homes was held in Nice on November 16 & 17, 2009. It was organised by Sigma Orionis in cooperation with the Beywatch project aiming at energy efficient homes and neighbourhoods and supported by the European Commission’s DG Information Society and Media.

The two-day event welcome 119 attendees from 19 countries (Europe, Japan and Canada) and featured 15 exhibitors (industrial organisations and collaborative research projects).

The ICT for sustainable homes conference and exhibition was focused on some issues faced to achieve the sustainable home: greener homes, more meaningful and affordable products, new markets at the international scale, health, security, communication, knowledge and learning, etc.

To address those topics, the conference was divited into 7 plenary sessions, featuring 37 high-level speakers, and 7 keynote speakers:

• Roger Torrenti, CEO of Sigma Orionis
• Alain Philip, Deputy Mayor of Nice, representing Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice and Minister for Industry, France
• Pablo Katz, Architect
• Luc Bourdeau, General Secretary of the European Construction Technology Platform (ECTP)
• Karina Marcus, Scientific Project Officer of the ICT for sustainable growth Unit at the European Commission’s DG Information Society and Media
• Pierre Plaza, Division Manager at Telefonica I+D and Coordinator of the Beywatch Project
• Claudio Borean, Research and Trends – Task leader at Telecom Italia
• Séphane Taupin, Business Development Director at EDELIA (EDF group)

Other presentations included contributions from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), CSTB, IPSO Alliance, Cisco Systems, the NEM Initiative, Orange, ECHONET, KNX, Veolia Habitat Services, CAPENERGIES, FAGOR, Telefonica I+D, Synelixis, University of Palermo, University of Nice, EDF R&D, etc. All presentations made during the conference can be downloaded as pdf files in the former ICT for sustainable homes website.

The end of the first day was concluded by a networking cocktail, during which the ICT for sustainable homes Award was given to the architect Pablo Katz, in recognition of the quality of the house he has designed in “Paris Countryside”, a realisation leveraging the use of information and communication technologies, and which is also… an attractive house!

In the next years, on the occasion of each ict for sustainable homes event, Sigma Orionis will have the pleasure to highlight, through an award, a project or a realisation that can be considered as an exemplary sustainable home (or apartment building or community area) making the best use of ICT.

While the first day of the event was devoted to ICT for sustainable homes as a whole, the second day, proposed in cooperation with the Beywatch project, focused on ICT for energy efficient homes and neighbourhoods, which may be considered as particularly promising application areas in the short term.

Aiming at discussing the status and perspectives for home energy management and energy efficient homes and neighbourhoods, the second day of the conference also aimed at spreading the project concepts and results towards the whole field in Europe and beyond. After an opening session featuring keynote speakers, the main project innovations have be presented and debated:

• Energy-aware white goods
• Machine to Machine and Man to Machine
• Energy consumption monitoring
• Combined PV and solar home system
• Load/energy management

The conference also included a roundtable entitled “Let’s Team Up for Greener Homes”, which was an opportunity for Beywatch project leaders and invited keynote speakers to highlight the major trends, from market, political and technological points of view, on how the ICT could be used to reduce the energy consumption at homes and buildings, thus reducing at the same time the CO2 emissions. By doing so, Utilities have with ICT a very powerful tool to manage the Grid and make it smarter. Chaired by Sonia Compans, Technical Officer at the ETSI, the roundtable feature the following participants:

Projects:

• IntUBE – Régis Decorme
• REEB – Alain Zarli
• eDiana – Borja Tellado
• PREMIO – Jean-Christophe Delvallet
• BeAware – Giulio Jacucci
• SmartHouse/SmartGrid – Stamatis Karnouskos
• AIM – Andreas Foglar
• HosPilot – Pascal Torres

Standard organisations:

• HGI – Duncan Bees
• OSGi – Peter Kriens
• REE – Susana Banares Hernandez
• CEDOM – Alvaro Ros
• ZigBee – Claudio Borean